Origins Dainik Jagran was first established in
Jhansi, a district town in the
United Provinces (later
Uttar Pradesh), by Puran Chandra Gupta in 1942. Prior to this, Gupta had worked as the managing editor of a local magazine (1939–42), during which he often travelled to
Bombay to secure advertising, gaining contacts in the publishing industry. Shortly after its launch, publication was suspended during the
Quit India Movement of 1942. By the mid-1950s, Gupta had started making pitches for advertisements and advertising the
Dainik Jagran itself. In the 1956 edition of
The Indian Press Year Book, the newspaper was advertised as
The Daily Jagran and claimed to have a circulation of 21,000 copies covering Uttar Pradesh and Vindhya Pradesh. Gupta registered the newspaper at the
Registrar of Newspapers for India, joined the industry body
Audit Bureau of Circulation and joined the publisher's club Indian and Eastern Newspaper Society (IENS) where he became an executive member by 1960
. The Kanpur edition, run by Puran Chandra Gupta was covering four neighbouring districts from the city and had reached a limit where it could no longer increase its circulation in the regional market. Shivprasad Gupta, the owner of
Aj was unsure about the expansion but Shukla supported by Gupta's son used the period as an opportunity to consolidate the newspaper. During the Emergency, the circulation of Hindi newspapers rose significantly as a result of increased political consciousness and by 1977, the number of newspapers that were selling more 100,000 copies had risen to over 10 from a figure three before its imposition.
Dainik Jagran and
Aj were both among the new newspapers to join the 100,000+ club. The period had transformed the newspaper industry and regional language papers including that of Hindi became the face of the rapidly changing industry that would be transformed into mass media over the course of the following decades.
Mayawati daughter story (1995) In December 1995,
Dainik Jagran published a story with the claim that
Mayawati, the leader of the
Bahujan Samaj Party, had an illegitimate 12-year-old daughter. Published at the bottom of the first page in a short two column section, the story included claims that her daughter was hidden away in New Delhi and was borne out of a former "
love marriage", based on an interview with a disgruntled member of the party. The newspaper went to the extent of calling Mayawati a "
chamarin", a derogatory slur used for Dalit women''. In Lucknow, supporters of the party demonstrated around the office of the newspaper, blockading it for a day. There were reports of violence during the protest and the author who wrote the piece was threatened. K. Vikram Rao, the national chairman of a major journalist's union suggested that a more rigorous system was required, that a specialised training in journalism should be needed before a person could be employed by a newspaper and that the Press Council should have stronger tools for penalising journalists. Staff at the newspaper strongly rejected the charges against the newspaper though they were apologetic about the story. Narendra Mohan who was the owner and
editor-in-chief of the newspapers at the time, responded to the criticism with an editorial. In the newspaper's defense, he stated that the newspaper itself was against this kind of journalism and he regretted that the story had been published but alleged that the fault lay on western norms influencing Indian journalism and on Mayawati herself who according to him used "ugly language" and was part of a trend where Indian politics had become unethical which had led to the situation. In response to the protest by BSP supporters, journalists who were supportive of newspaper held their own protest against the party describing it to be in defense of press freedom. It was reported that several newspapers were going to boycott the party's campaign during the
upcoming assembly election though the boycott was only upheld by
Dainik Jagran. For
Jagran, it was the second and third generation of the proprietors who charted the expansion and localisation strategy of the newspaper. The expanding newspapers were motivated by the prospects of revenues that could be obtained by offering increased overall readership figures to advertisers. and employed local part time
stringers for its newsgathering operations. The expansion efforts by the established newspapers led to increased localisation of news content across the
Hindi belt but severely harmed stand-alone local newspapers who were unable to compete against them in terms of production or offers to advertisers. The changes however did not bring about any improvements in the working conditions, job security and professional autonomy of reporters. Most of them were kept as part timers and those who were granted regular positions were retained on a "hire-and-fire" basis. In 1992,
Jagran had only 55 full time staff correspondents and 300 "working journalists" in a total staff strength of 700, the rest being stringers, regional correspondents, etc.
Jagran launched its
Aligarh edition in 1993, the
Dehradun edition in 1997 and the
Jalandhar edition in 1999. In 1998, the newspaper received a competitive boost when the Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave an exclusive interview for it in midst of the
Kargil War. The interview was later seen as an act of political patronage towards a newspaper that had remained loyal to Vajpayee and his Bharatiya Janata Party. In the
National Readership Survey of 1999,
Dainik Jagran was seen to have become the first Hindi language newspaper to feature in the top 5 newspapers in terms of readership, at a time when newspapers from
southern India dominated the readership figures. The launch of the Jalandhar edition in
Punjab in 1999 was the first of a series of editions outside Uttar Pradesh and is described to have been the beginning of its real expansion. When
Uttaranchal became a state with Dehradun as its capital,
Dainik Jagran’s circulation experienced a fourfold growth in the new state due to the increased commercial importance of the state's capital. In February 2003, the newspaper launched 3 editions in
Jharkhand in the cities of Ranchi,
Jamshedpur and
Dhanbad. It was aggressively marketed and publicised but was unable to make a significant impact as
Prabhat Khabar dominated the market in the state.
Dainik Jagran launched editions in
Bhagalpur and
Panipat in the same year, two more editions in the cities of
Ludhiana and
Nainital in 2004 and then the
Muzaffarpur,
Dharamshala and
Jammu editions in 2005. In the meantime, commercial interests in the wake of the rapid rise of Hindi newspaper readership compelled the mainstream Hindi newspapers to moderate their adversarial stance towards backward and
scheduled caste leaders. By 2006, the upper caste Chairman of Jagran Prakashan,
Mahendra Mohan Gupta was vying for and received a Rajya Sabha nomination from the
Samajwadi (Socialist) Party which was led by the backward-caste
Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav who had also been an old adversary for the newspaper. From 2004 onwards,
Dainik Jagran had emerged as the newspaper with the largest readership, having displaced Dainik
Bhaskar that had occupied the position since 2002. The two newspapers had maintained a tacit understanding since the beginning of their out of state expansion drives in the mid-1990s, that they would not encroach upon each other's territories. As a consequence,
Jagran had not launched a new edition in
Madhya Pradesh or
Chhattisgarh while
Bhaskar had not launched any editions in Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar or Jharkhand. In 2006, the understanding between the two was broken by
Jagran when the newspapers launched its
Indore edition which marked the beginning of a period intense rivalry between the two. The new edition was unsuccessful in making in-roads in the market, unable to compete against the Indore edition of
Dainik Bhaskar as well as the newspaper
Nai Duniya that was based in the same city, while
Bhaskar went on to launch its own edition in
Jagran's territory. On 8 July 2006,
Dainik Jagran also launched its
Siliguri edition, just two days after the
Nathu La mountain pass was opened with the expectation that the city would become a major commercial centre. The launch added to the intensification of competition in the region which lay beyond the
Hindi belt and already had editions of the two Hindi newspapers, namely
Prabhat Khabar and
Rajasthan Patrika, the former of which was launched only a few months ago in March.
Government advertisements and shrinking readership From the onset of
Narendra Modi's tenure as the
Prime Minister of India, government spending on advertisements in
Dainik Jagran saw a sharp increase with exorbitant spending on regular advertisements. Between 2014–15 and 2018–19, the revenues generated solely from government advertisements of the
Central Government was reported to have increased to over . In one financial year, FY2017–18, the newspaper received in ad revenue from the Central Government which was more than the combined ad revenue of that the paper had received between 2010 and 2013, covering three financial years before Modi had come to power.
Jagran's sister publications such as
Mid-Day and
Inquilab experienced similar increases in revenue from government advertisements. The advertisement spending by state governments of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, particularly the Uttar Pradesh Government whose advertisements regularly featured in the newspaper was not disclosed upon
Right to Information (RTI) requests. The government also inducted Sanjay Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper into the board of
Prasar Bharati, India's public broadcaster in 2020. Per the Indian Readership Survey in 2019,
Dainik Jagran's average issue readership fell by 17% from a figure of 20.3 million to 16.9 million. In Uttar Pradesh which stood as its biggest market, the readership fell from 12 million to 9.97 million while in the state of Bihar, it fell from 3.41 million to 2.97 million. The fall in readership was part of a general trend of fall in newspaper readership due to economic slowdown, only 3 out of the 10 newspapers with the largest readership did not experience a fall. One of them was its rival,
Dainik Bhaskar which came close to displacing Jagran's position as the newspaper with the largest readership. Its readership had increased from 15.4 to 15.6 million with gains in Bihar. According to media watchdog
Newslaundry, the
Dainik Jagran was suffering from "falling credibility in a politically polluted atmosphere" among other issues.
Majithia Board recommendations Coronavirus pandemic and aftermath On 22 March 2020, the
COVID-19 lockdown in India was announced and it heavily impacted news publishers who were already strained due to the emergence of other forms of news media that had splintered audiences and due to the economic slowdown caused by
demonetisation and
GST. R. K. Agarwal, the CFO of Jagran Prakashan described the situation as a nightmare.
Dainik Jagran adopted across the board cost cutting measures; the newspapers halved the number of pages and consolidated printing. It also started raising its cover prices whenever it could which Agarwal claimed was done to recover lost advertisement revenue. In its pandemic reportage, the newspaper promoted
conspiracy theories against Muslims and extensively publicised the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh including through the publication of various articles authored by its senior leaders. The overall coverage lacked transparency, journalistic ethics, accuracy and factual reporting. The reportage prioritised stories on
Tablighi Jamaat publishing 230 of them on its frontpage including 120
above the fold and blamed Muslims for the pandemic.
Dainik Jagran's coverage largely ignored and distracted from issues such as the
mass exodus of migrant workers, low testing rates, the lack of PPE kits and ventilators in hospitals and general mismanagement by the government. It instead condemned opposition parties that criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government's management and accused them of spreading "negativity" at a time when the government was dealing with a "war-like situation". The newspaper itself criticised measures taken by state governments with an opposition party or coalition in power while praising similar measures taken in Bharatiya Janata Party ruled states. On 23 May 2021,
Dainik Jagran published a frontpage story that claimed that the mass burials were normal, that no increase in deaths had occurred and that those who were buried had died of leprosy and snake bites, dismissing the reports from other news publishers as mere
sensationalism. The story included a comparison of a recent image with an image that it claimed was taken three years ago from a mass burial at the Shringverpur ghat in
Prayagraj and on its basis falsely stated that most images of mass burials at the ghat were taken before the pandemic. According to the news piece,
Jagran had employed a five-man team who made finding after covering over a dozen villages along a 70 km stretch on the Ganga, which included the Phaphamau and Shringverpur ghats. The story was highlighted by BJP politicians including the Chief Minister
Yogi Adityanath and then followed by a series of reports from the newspaper between late May to early June that attempted to reinforce the same idea. The newspaper before publishing the 23 May piece had previously published news reports which contradictorily stated that there was an increase in mass burials and coronavirus related deaths. which was supported by Prayagraj-based photojournalist Prabhat Kumar Verma,
Aaj Tak reporter Shivendra Srivastav who had covered Phaphamau ghat and government data related to local management. Alt News contacted reporters at
Dainik Jagran's Prayaraj edition who refused to comment on the story but two of them confirmed that there was an unprecedented increase in the number of mass burials. == Organisation ==